Cleveland student completes internship at Embassy of Ukraine

WASHINGTON - Taras Seryy of Cleveland recently completed a two-month internship at the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, which was sponsored by the The Washington Group's Fellowship Fund.

Mr. Seryy is beginning his junior year at John Carroll University in Cleveland, where he is majoring in finance and accounting. He is interested in pursuing a career that will allow him to apply American business practices in the former Soviet Union.

During his internship Mr. Seryy helped the Embassy with preparations for such events as the Washington visit of Borys Tarasyuk, Ukraine's foreign affairs minister, and the July meeting of the Kuchma-Gore Binational Commission. On a daily basis he helped out with translations, general office work and the Embassy's website.

Mr. Seryy said he applied for the internship because he saw it as "an opportunity to go abroad without leaving the country." By this he meant that he wanted to gain exposure to how the Embassy works and how it interacts with the international community based in Washington. He noted that it was a "positive experience" that taught him a lot about relations between people and how the diplomatic world works.

Mr. Seryy is an immigrant - sort of. He was actually born in New York City, where his father worked in the Soviet Union's Mission to the United Nations. As Mr. Seryy tells it, his father fell out of favor with his superiors, because of his growing close ties with local Ukrainian Americans. His diplomatic tour of duty was cut short and the family returned to Moscow (when Taras was about a year old).

Mr. Seryy spent the next 13 years in Moscow, before "immigrating" to the U.S. with his family. He also said he spent his summers in the village with his grandmother, in the family's native Sumy Oblast.

His father was a co-founder of the Slavutych Society in Moscow, an association of Ukrainians in the Soviet capital, and of the Moscow Ukrainian Studies School which held classes on Sundays.

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Those interested in supporting a future intern may send contributions made out to "TWG Fellowship Fund" to: The Washington Group, P.O Box 11248, Washington, DC 20008.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, September 13, 1998, No. 37, Vol. LXVI

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